Autumn (rains a lot)

It's nearly mid-November and London is now towards the end of Autumn. I like Autumn. Not only are the colours pretty, it rains a lot here in London. I've been conscious of the fact that I enjoy rain since I was about 10. It's rained every day for the past week. It's great. At work I have a view of London's main business district - the City. Distant buildings look soft and grey through the rain. I'm not sure why, but I like that. So when I'm at work and I look out the window, I enjoy noticing the patter of the rain on the puddles that form on our terrace. Occasionally the drizzle becomes a minor deluge, but it's always raining. Great.

When I was a kid I used to enjoy being indoors, sitting by the window watching the rain. Maybe I was drawing, playing lego, playing with transformers, or watching cartoons. But I was always happy that it was raining. Sometimes the rain would stop and I'd notice patches of blue sky appearing between the clouds. That would always disappoint me, because I wanted it to drizzle forever.

Several years ago I flew to London via Korea, because it was the cheapest flight available. It was my first time to the country, and all I got was one night in a guesthouse near the airport. I went to sleep very happy that night because lying in bed I could hear the rain outside. Despite waking in the night to close my window to stop rain and wind getting into my room, I felt I slept very soundly because of the rain, and in the morning woke up totally energised and in good spirits. Later the same day on the plane I was chatting with Korean business man. He told me that the rain last night was in fact part of a medium level typhoon.

Anyway, this post is just meant to be a place for me to post of photos of Autumn in London. Rain photos may follow. Enjoy. =)

View from my flat

In Hyde Park

A squirrel

Bollywood

I'm still in Bangkok, it's now my last night. I've had a very nice stay. Apart from enjoying eating Thai food, meeting old friends, idly roaming Bangkok's streets and not working, I've been on a bit of a Bolly Binge.

The friends that I'm staying with in Bangkok (not Indians) have been taken away on a storm of a Bollywood, and since arriving in their house I've been swept me along with them. I've been here a handful of nights and I've already seen 4 Bollywood films - quite an achievement as each film is roughly 3 hours long.


Aaye Din Bahar Ke (1966)

Probably my favourite film so far. Set in the beautiful hills of Darjeeling, tells the story of two couples from two generations, dealing with the issue of relationships crossing social classes. Powerful story with great music and dancing!

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995)

A particularly high grossing film in India featuring the (apparently) famous Shahrukh Khan. This film deals with the issue of love versus arranged marriages in India. Nice European scenery and again, powerful story. I think Shahrukh Khan plays a right twit, but overall quite pleased with the ending. Good soundtrack too!

Kismat Konnection (2008)

This modern film was much weaker than the older films above. Set in Toronto Canada, I wasn't aware that most people in Canada speak Hindi. This film doesn't explore any real social issues - and the plot resolves itself a little too easily. Some amiable characters, but content is just a hollow shell of eye candy. Not bad songs.

Golmaal Returns (2008)

I just came from a special screening of this Bollywood film in a cinema packed with Indians - myself and my friends were the only non-Indians. Quite simply this movie was dreadful. It was pure slapstick, silly sound effects, and no substance. After the above I've come to expect high standards from Bollywood and this let me down. The two songs in it were catchy, but not relevant to the plot and there were only two of them! Hope to find better than this.

Summary

Bollywood is great. From these few films that I've seen, the plot is pretty much always about an annoying guy meeting a girl on very bad terms and they end up marrying each other at the end. On the way from the predictable beginning to the predictable ending, these films have the potential to touch on some very key social issues in India, and I'm all for that. Have enjoyed what I've seen and am looking forward to more!

Bangkok

Hello. Well, *finally* I have reason and motivation to write in my blog. I've been spending some nice days with my girlfriend in London, taking pictures of the Autumn leaves in various London parks, but am yet to post those here.

Right now though, I'm on the road again. I'm not in the office today, nor will I be for the entire week. I am in Thailand, and being here feels like an echo of last year - when I had the whole year off for care-free travels. I don't have quite as much time this trip, but it's pleasant not to have to think of work. I'm come here for a friend's wedding.

For those of you who don't know, I used to live in Bangkok, and I've been back as frequently as I've been able. I know the place well, it's really like another home for me. I am of course farang (the Thai word for foreigner), so there's plenty I don't know about the place or haven't discovered, and each time I come back there's lots for me to learn and lots of new food to try.

People have very different views on Bangkok - some love it, some hate it. I can sympathise with both views. Everyone, I'm sure, will agree that Bangkok is a sensory overload. Bangkok attacks you through every sensory channel - strong smells, either putrid or divine, force themselves in your face; loud sounds, pretty or coarse, are always at your ears; the tropical heat penetrates you from every direction, leaving you sweating much like the steam in your bathroom after you've had a very long, hot shower and your ventilation isn't working; the food, famously, is divine; visually, you will never be bored - there are endless arrays of street food vendors, sickly dogs, flower-stalls, khlongs (which are canals but also open sewers), everyday I walk past a chap doing welding work without gloves or glasses of any kind... etc.

Well, that's all I've got to say for now. Am attaching some photos. Bangkok: the place and it's food. ;p

A typical Bangkok lane

A hot, wet, sweaty day in Bangkok

Thais wearing the King's colour yellow on the King's day (Monday), as is their habit over recent years, to show solidarity & support for the King.

Lunch - Pad Thai noodles with prawns (& a section of a banana flower)

Lunch - the Thai take on a Chinese pork dish

Life

I'm at home now, it's late on a Sunday evening, and I'll be going to work in the morning. It's dark but warm out, today was an unusually warm day. I have a lamp on and I just listen to some soft music as I get ready for bed.

I'm very busy these days. I seldom get a chance to write my blog, as any readers of this blog should know by now. I take pictures from time to time, snapshots of my life in London. I'll share a handful here.

Work
I work just east of the City of London. I get out at Liverpool Street Station every morning, as do thousands of other city workers. Together, as a great mass of bodies, we heave out of the station to go to work, day in day out.



London
There's lots to do and see in London, I stroll around a lot. There're nice parks and architecture, there're classical concerts and plays, art exhibitions, and all sorts of other things to occupy one's self with. Outside work, being involed in London takes up a lot of time. As nice as London can be, I find I haven't much time to myself. I also get the feeling, increasingly, of being too couped up in London, I sort of yearn to get out into nature a bit. I spent most of my time in buildings.



Home
I have a nice room to myself, not far from Hyde Park. Occasionally I get the chance to roam in the park after work. Usually the only time I spend at home is in the evening. I have a view of the next building's fire exit. I can hear pigeons in the cavity between. I'm happy enough here.

My new PC

Well I've now got my own PC. I wish I didn't have one, because having one disrupts my otherwise calm life-style. It's 2am now and if I didn't have a computer I would have read and gone to sleep by midnight. I've had the laptop 3 days and already the Windows Vista Anti-Virus tool has told me that I have 452 viruses on my computer and prompts me to pay £50 to buy a licence to be able to remove them.

On running my computer for the first time, my machine had to go through a series of updates which took about 2 hours. Not very pleased with welcome I've had to Windows. I'm thinking about why I didn't get a mac or why I shouldn't soon move to Linux instead.

Frustrated.

Routine

After *a very long time*, my life has fallen back into routine. Work on the weekdays, relax on the weekends. My current lifestyle doesn't allow for much blogging. Work is busy and outside work, well, I seldom have access to a computer. I quite enjoy not having a computer at home. But there's pressure on me from various sources to buy a computer. So I might have one soon. If I do get one, I expect it will mean more regular blog entries from me. I've been taking all sorts of photos as well, so it might mean I actually get to put them on here. Maybe even back on my Flickr! ^^

Today rained all day. It didn't affect me so much as I was stuck in the office. But now, in the evening, it's pleasant being indoors while it rains outside. I listen to soft songs by a genius of a musician called Jo Yun-Sook but who goes by the title of 'Lucid Fall'. Some songs are here. They're all nice, but try 'Why do I need feet when I have...'

While I enjoy not having a computer, I do miss being in contact with people. It's hard to squeeze in all my communications at work, having a computer at home would let me do that! Oh well, this is all I have to write right now. Wishing you all the best. Yoni

Enjoying the English 'Summer'

As an Australian it's my duty in part to complain about the English weather. It's 'Summer' already, and I spend my days in the office wearing a jumper (but then we have particularly cold air-conditioning). In the few minutes I have to check my personal email at work I also check the BBC website to find the London forecast for the weekend. Sometimes I check the forecast for other world cities too, to see what I'm missing out on. Bangkok: 34C light showers, Barcelona: 36C sunny, Beijing: 28C sunny. Yet despite being close to mid-Summer, London only ever seems to be cloudy with light showers.

So there's plenty of gloom about the English Summer - it's always hotter and drier elsewhere. But it's not all bad news. What the weather lacks in ferocity and consistency is made up for in wonderful, if very occasional, temperate pleasantness. Over Summer, the days get longer and longer until the dusk nearly meets dawn, and the country erupts with green. Although it's cold, wet and windy most of the time, on a nice day, rare as they are, life is so pleasant and the world feels happy to exist.

Last weekend the forecast was for rain, but 'sunny intervals' prevailed, so I made the most by taking a certain someone to visit a country park near my old house. We sat under an oak tree, had a picnic lunch, lay on the grass, strolled through the meadows and finished off the the afternoon with tea and scones. Such days, although few and far between, are about as pleasant as can be, and are certainly worth waiting the rest of the week under an umbrella for.

I'm not dead

Just to let you all know, I'm not dead. I'm just very very busy and I don't have a computer at home. Hope to fix that and return to writing regular posts soon.

Long weekend

Long weekends are great, there should be more of them. Sri Lankans get a whopping 25 public holidays this year (compared to UK 8) - including one each month for the day of the full moon.

Saturday
Anyway, my long weekend was fine. On Saturday I made it to pretty Oxford for an old highschool friend's wedding. Nice day, happy to see him married. Went for a stroll in a country park, and the town.

Sunday
Met some Irish friends for lunch. Then returned home and played lots of Mario Kart Wii.

Monday
Today was a typical English Spring day. Cold, wet and windy. Got to Chinatown for lunch, got drenched, returned home to cook some Thai food with my friends, then played lots of Mario Kart Wii. I didn't take any pictures of the rain.





P.S. Sorry none of these pictures are getting onto my Flickr account. I've been quite lazy, and since my camera broke last year, I got out of the habit of uploading. Will start again soon, I hope.

On the pleasures of music

Today I got quite a bit of pleasure from listening to music - from both the softer and harder ends of the musical spectrum. I find music has the ability to give at times a very special, almost euphoric kind of pleasure. And it's ability to do so completely perplexes me. I'd like to know why music is so imporant to us and can evoke emotion in all of us, and how it came to be so.

I guess you could call me an evolutionist, I believe that which ever traits we have, we have them because of natural selection from evolutionary pressures on our ancestors. We fear, for instance, because those who didn't posses such a thing as fear didn't last long enough to leave children. We enjoy certain foods because of some personal pyschology perhaps, but more broadly I believe it's because of natural selection - and while I might not know the exact mechanism, it's probably the case that if we tend to die young if we don't get nutrient A, then those people who tended to like, and thus seek out essential nutrient A, tended not to die before they left children.

Any aspect of ourselves should have a reason for being so. The pleasures of music seem to be common to us all. But why? I don't get it. What advantage did early humans have in an ability to find pleasure out of very particular sounds. There could be social reasons, but as far as I'm concerned, I've not yet heard a convincing explanation as to why we find pleasure in music. I once read a theory to do with the fact that we inherited an inclination to be sensitive to rhythm from fish, but I wasn't entirely convinced.

Hard Music
Hyperviolet - by Pig Destroyer
Accessible Losses - by Darkest Hour
As the earth spins round - by Sikth, but sample misses the best bits :(

Today I roamed the streets a little melancholy - with a certain someone in mind. To lighten my mood I decided to play a little Pig Destroyer, on a metal mix that my friend Mr Michael Rayner recently compiled for me. This, along with some other tracks, somehow focused my mind, and made the task of walking down the street that much more pleasurable.

I'm new to 'metal'. I used to enjoy some songs bordering metal, but I never quite crossed the death growl threshold. My friend is an avid metal fan, so I asked him to compile a sampling of metal music to help me see why metal is so great. Indeed, its combination of death growls (which become rather quaint, I think), virtuosic guitar and drums, grunging assonance and leading, blasting rhythm is quite hyptnotic. 'As the earth goes round' has a particularly beautiful ending, lulling you away to a contemplative state, underscored by a tyranny of bass beats.

I just have to be careful not to put the volume too loud on my iPod because I came home tonight with a ring in my ear, similar to when you come home from a club. It lasted about an hour.

Soft Music
An die musik (an Ode to Music) - by Franz Schubert
Clarinet Quintet in A, K581, Larghetto - by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Prelude No.4 Opus 28 - by Frédéric Chopin

Softer music also gives me great pleasure. I'm not the best piano player in the world, but when I got home tonight I completely unwound myself by playing some tunes on the piano - Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert - some of my favourite composers. I'm sure plenty of people have written on the pleasures of Mozart, and have attempted to explain its origins in pyschology or perhaps mathematics or both. I don't know why it gives pleasure, just that it does. It can take me away to a beautiful, melancholy place, it can bring elation, and such joy and sadness. The two sometimes get confused.

Garfield minus Garfield

When you take Garfield out of Garfield, you get a tragicomic tale of a very lonely man...

Refamiliarising myself with London

Friends
Went over the weekend to drinks & dinner with some university friends plus many others. We fit 30 people (not all present in photo) into the smallest apartment I've ever seen at 10 square metres. It was hot, loud and sweaty, but kind of fun.


Work
Today was my first day back at work. It wasn't so bad. The weather is nothing short of perfect - warm blue-sky days. I wasn't expected at the office until 9:30 so I took a leisurely stroll to the office, through leafy streets and several churchyards, remembering how pretty parts of London are.



Thoughts
Still plenty on my mind. Took a seat this evening by the Thames, near my friend's house. Sat for a while. Read and watched the people going by. Occasionally I'd glance up, nice view...

London

Summer has certainly arrived in London. Today was a beautiful day at 27C. Met a friend for ice-cream, then joined some other friends and sat in the park...


Tomorrow is my first day back at work...

Leaving Canada, Arriving in London

Leaving Canada
Pleasant few days in Vancouver after my short stay in Whistler. I basically spent the whole time with friends, cooking, visiting nude beaches, riding bicycles, eating lots. For some reason my appetite has been HUGE recently. I don't know why.




Arriving in London
Minutes into arriving in London I realised how much better Vancouver is than London. I missed the clean crisp Vancouver air, its spacious streets, ample trees, endless water and towering mountains. What a special place. London's rather squalid, flat, urban, it's too big and too busy. It's bedlam. At least, those were my first thoughts this morning.

After a nap, I had a bit of a change of heart. My friend got home so we headed to central London - Charing Cross, Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden. I know London very well, returning feels like coming home. And Summer nights are rather special in London, as was today's. There's such a festive atmosphere in town, all the pubs overflow with drinkers onto cobble streets, all chatting away in the balmy evening air. We had dinner, then went for a drink. I guess being back is not so bad after all... It's just very familiar.

Whistler

My time in Whistler is nearly up. Yesterday proved to be a good day. Started with a huge breakfast, then left to myself. Went for a stroll through Whistler village. Made it to some golf course. Saw two bears. It's a strange thing, to see a bear. I found myself thinking: if the bear starts running, which direction will I run? It did start to run, but not in my direction, so it was all fine.


After my encounter with the bears, I met Mike to do a small hike. According to Mike's calculations there should have been no snow left in the forest, but in fact we did the entire hike over 1-4 ft of snow. Which wasn't entirely unpleasant, in fact it was quite fun.




What a beautiful part of the world.

Shredding the Gnar Gnar

One of the reasons I decided to pass through Canada on my way to the UK was because two of my friends live and work in Whistler - a premier ski-resort a about an hour and half away from Vancouver. Yesterday morning we made the drive up to Whistler, past exceptional scenery - mountains rising from the sea.


It's Spring now, and by a lucky fluke there's enough snow left on the mountains to ski or snowboard on.

This was my first morning in Whistler, and along with my two friends Mike and Tina, we were ready to shred the gnar gnar. This is snowboarding lingo for riding fresh snow. I have never snowboarded before, and it showed. I didn't so much shred the gnar gnar as slide down it on my backside. That was for the first hour anyway. I sort of got the hang of it after that. It was nice up the mountain. It snowed. Snowboarding was very fun, but very tiring. And by the time I got back down to the village my appetite was huge. A fun day.